I have a few thoughts about this topic, so I'll start with how I design ships. I do usually like building larger hulled ships, but I've found that small/tiny ships can be very useful in a 'supported defense' setup. If you intend for your fighters to just operate in the vicinity of your military bases, you can pass on giving them any kind of sensors, support mods, and possibly any engines, as they will always be within the 'shadow' of your military base. Here, each ship gets the bonuses your base provides, and with a potential for +16 to each attack type per ship, the more hulls you can manage, the better. Add in the benefit of having a subspace wake/inverse tractor beam, and you really don't need weapons on these short range fighters, letting you pack in a lot of weapons/armor on your 'fighters'. Then, just combine them into the largest fleets your logistics will allow and have fun. (Mind you, I haven't fully tested this, but it seems quite feasible.) Obviously, in areas where I don't intend to have the support of large, well-equipped military starbases, I will tend towards larger hulls, which are more robust when operating independently.

Secondly, I've been thinking about this for some time now, and I think that one major reason we don't see more variety in people's selection of hull sizes is that there is no consideration of accuracy in combat. The attack and defense rolls work the same regardless of whether the target ship is tiny or huge. Obviously, introducing an entirely new variable into combat is not really desirable at this point, but there is a way to simulate this factor in combat. By applying a defense modifier based on hull type, you could simulate the fact that smaller ships are harder to hit and less likely to take large damage, and at the same time simulate that larger ships need more defensive components to protect their larger bulk.

Implementing such a modifier might be a good idea for a minor mod, but I really lack the programming ability to make this happen. Maybe it already has and I'm just not aware of this, or maybe the programming doesn't support such an option of adding a modifier based on hull size. Still, if anyone's interested in the idea, I'd be glad to post my thoughts on such a thing.

actually on my last MVL game, i was building huge-hulled warships with 1 warp IV, 4 psionic beams, and the rest full of aereon missle defense. they were expensive, but i could churn them out in a few turns on several worlds.

my trick is to make all the extreme-environment worlds i colonize economy worlds. i queue up 1 factory, 1 farm, 1 starport, 1 more factory, and then spam banks across the rest of the planet. it can take a while to develop, but it saves me the effort of researching the advanced techs for those worlds. after they finish doing that, i just set them to build constructors. i turn all my regular worlds into factory planets and i can churn out even the most expensive warships in a relatively short time frame. my ships came out to 49 attack and something like 300 defense (after the Krynn's +50% bonus, but w/o any military mining SBs). two or three of them decimated both the drengin and arceans in a few turns without taking more than a point or two of damage. before that i had mostly built cargo-hulled paper tigers (with missiles rather than beams, encouraging my opponents to research the improper defense type). this was on tiny/mixed abundant and uncommon map, set to crippling with fast research.

don't get me wrong - i didn't build up my worlds like this from the start. my original worlds were all mixed industry/research/econ. it wasn't until later into the (4-year) game that i retooled my entire empire for wartime production.

Playing dreadlords mostly on gigantic galaxy and though AI
In the early days: mixed research of bonus techs (+X social production,...) and speed techs (surely ion and normally impulse). During that period the speediest cargohulled ships have my preference (colony,scout,constructor) and a cartonboard type of ship (cargohulled, tons of weaponry but no engines) as it has just to be a mean sitting duck.

Early fighters: medium sized with 2-3 engines, armed to the teeth with spare defence.
(speed 8-15)
When huge hulled come available, that size comes my favorite for the planets that are able to build it in a reasonable time. Mostly 20-30 parsecs speed, wellarmed.
Early on I skip on defence since it also increases maintenance. Later optional.
Mid-late game: low production/new planets: medium fighter, transports, constructors
(up to 49 parsecs, 2 billion troops/transport), lurkers (cargohulled, 1 damage weapon, extremely speedy)
High production planets: transports, huge ships.
The medums can pack quite a punch when fleeted, the huge can kill of all starbases relatively unharmed behind the enemy lines.
In a sparse world there are also military starbases to extend the range.

No speed= no initiative= extremely boring play in gigantic

I like to vary up my strategies when it comes to hull size. Some games I specifically AVOID incresing my hull sizes, and instead focus on making technically advanced small hulls. Other games, I'll rush to large hulls and grab a significant military advantage THAT way. A large hull lumbering around with a bunch of lasers is an amusing, albiet effective, design early game.

Whatever I'm in the mood in, I guess.

TA lets me be even more creative with my ship strategies. With a couple HP boosting components, a small hull can be turned into a formiddable piece of machinery. It comes at the cost of a little firepower and a lot of money, but the ships have a much better survivability. With the appropriate race (the Iconians and their organic hull plating come to mind) you can use a couple HP components to make a small hull match up favourably against a medium hull!

Hell, I've tacked on 5 HP to a tiny fighter to make them more durable than a stock heavy fighter, but with a third less logistics cost.

And I haven't even messed around with fleet modules much, yet!

edit: access denied

Fleets are mixed on speed, usually hullsize since the larger hulls tend to have some more engines in place.

i'm really new to the game so take whatever I say with a huge grain of salt.

I'm playing DA

I have one race that is very fluid but the others are developed with a plan in mind before I even start playing. So...

If conquest is what i'm looking for I go with beeeg sheeps to smash things and increase my chances of keeping high-leveled units on the map.

If an influence victory is my goal then I go with tiny or small ships and military starbases to get the most out of the bonuses the bases provide.

There are a lot of factors for ships. This is really an interesting read.

I generally play on smaller maps, so things like lifesupport don't matter. In my current game, I took out the Krynn using tiny hulls. It really just depends on what you are facing at the time and what your abilities are.

In my example, I could produce tiny hulls faster with the same damage potential as the Krynn's small hulls, giving me an edge.

Now I'm at war with the Altarians, who are throwing around medium hulls, so I'm going to have to adopt a new ship line to deal with them.

ps, For some reason, this thread Totally reminded me of the shipbuilding in MOO2, anyone remember the invincible ship?

Here's my 2 bc, on something no one has mentioned yet, and something which I only learned recently fighting the Dread Lords: the 4th defense - Tie Rule.

The 4th defense, in DA(1.80G), is the tie rule. Whenever two ships fire killing shots at each other, the ship with the highest maximum HP survives unscathed. In fleets, this still counts on a per-ship basis, which means that 4 8-hp heavy fighters still can't take out a 20-hp frigate despite unleashing sufficient firepower.

Thus, when my 46-attack battleship, with no defenses and 5 hp, entered combat with a 139-attack Dread Lords fighter who had 11 hp, it swatted the Dread Lords fighter because it's max hp was 67 and because it fired a strong opening shot(>11hp damage inflicted).

This way, all you need is to have ships with more hp than enemy ships and enough firepower to knock out their ships in less than or equal to as much time they would need to do the same. With hp-booster techs researched and Xinathium Hull Plating built, you can load up a frigate with lots of high-power weapons and no defenses and kill an enemy frigate with more firepower than your own. Because you win the tie rule.

Thus, my high-hp all-attack battleships actually steamrolled the Dread Lord forces in Apocalypse(played through DA), slaughtering 33(!) of them for 0 losses. How useful the tie-rule would be in fleet-vs-fleet combat, however, I don't know(the DLs didn't use fleets). But in one-on-one, it's a nice exploitation.

Man, the tie rules sucks. Way too ripe for exploitation.

Indeed. When playing the campaign, all you need to research are engines, psionic beams, and huge hulls. Takes forever, and building the ship will ruin your empire, but you only need one ship to win.

The other side of this is, there's a minimum tech level needed to beat any Dread Lord ship. If you can't get over that level, no number of lesser ships will be able to do more than annoy them.

And FYI PeskyFly, the tie rule applies only to the last surviving ship in each fleet. If both sides have mostly-offense ships, you are far better off attacking singly instead of in a fleet.

Different ship designs for different purposes.

I never build Huge ships except to dominate ship to ship combat. If your purpose is to destroy enemy fleets, you want a big nasty ship with plenty of the correct defense type, or else only weapons and engines. For this purpose, you build as large as your tech will allow. You want lots of engines on this one - it helps it to destroy as many fleets as possible.


For garrison duty, I build only Small and Tiny ships. Sometimes, you can get away with using a Cargo Hull with weapons as garrison, but some AIs will build Transport Ships with weapons, too, so it pays to have a decent garrison Fighter. The purpose of a Garrison Fighter is simply to preempt any Transport from invading without a fight. You want one early, but two or three later on to fight off potentially large numbers of armed Transports. You want Small and Tiny Hulls so that garrisoning your entire empire won't break the bank. It's nice to have a hammer of a Starship to go around taking names, even 20 of them, but you can't always afford that.

These Fighters also serve alternative functions. Banded together (as when you're facing an unstoppable invading fleet and have to evac Fighters) and placed in the vicinity of a defensive Military Starbase, they can offer a stiff enough resistance to slow or even stop invasion. Use one defense module and one engine of your best kind and get weapons for the rest.

Medium Hulls are the workhorse of the fleets (for my games anyway). They arrive early and serve as capital ships early on. Once larger ships arrive, they serve to stiffen Garrison forces on a system-wide basis. Whereas you garrison Fighter one or two to a planet, systems with 3 or 4 valuable planets, or in strategic locations can be worth a fleet of Mediums. Frigate-purpose Mediums later in the game serve one purpose: raiding. Their purpose is to take out undefended Starbases and Resources as well as clear the way for invading Transports. There's no point tying up your Dreadnaught for a chore lesser ships can handle. If the Planet or System doesn't house a significant enemy fleet, your Frigates should be able to handle the job. Together with Fighters, Frigates can lay waste rapidly to enemy trade routes and undefended asteroids, resources, and starbases.

Garrison Mediums take a variety of formats depending on the game state, but Frigate-class Mediums generally use two of your best Engines, and a defense-based ship design. The point here is that if one of these ships can't take out a Starbase, then a fleet of attack-based designs would be too expensive for the purpose anyhow. Send your Dreadnaughts for those targets.

Finally, the purpose of Large Ships is to serve as capitals until Huges come along, and then thereafter they serve as the bulk of your standing fleets. Having a bunch of Huges is great, but having a sizable number of Larges is easier to maintain, cheaper to upgrade, and you can customize your firepower spread better. Fleets of ultra-fast Larges can be retrofitted in a jiffy to serve as Heavy Frigates in case your Mediums aren't cutting it.